The lively tale of two best friends who take refuge in a country bar to flee a stalker and a hurricane. Slim and The Beast is David Foster Wallace meets Coen Brothers meets Larry David.

Sergeant Chandler Dykes is obsessed with two misfits: Slim, a former cadet and disillusioned Iraq veteran with a brutal neck scar, and his best friend, The Beast, a college basketball star with a proclivity for cooking.As Slim and The Beast sidle up to a bar to take shelter from a hurricane, they strike up a conversation with the bartender, and learn that Sgt. Dykes has been haunting the place, raving about opossums, bathtub whiskey, and his estranged cadet, Slim. As the three men swap tales in hopes of understanding Dykes' obsession, they are forced to confront their own troubled pasts.With dexterous prose and unflinching humor, wrapped in the rich dialect of the South, the conversations at Lockart's traverse art, love, sex, and philosophy, while warily observing the increasingly savage storm and the ghosts it seems to be dredging up. A remarkable first novel that recalls the liveliness of Wells Tower and packs the punch of Denis Johnson, Samuél L. Barrantes' Slim and The Beast lays out what’s at stake in a friendship, and the decisions we make on the edge of adulthood that define the person we become.